LK Advani: Always the Bridesmaid

The Babri Masjid demolition case may or may not make constitutional history, but the man who will be remembered either way is LK Advani, the infamous star of the show.

I

don’t personally know Lal Krishna Advani, but I imagine that every few months, when a non-hearing of the Babri Masjid demolition comes up, Advani puts on a white kurta, looks at his frailness in the mirror, and remarks, “Phir se chutiyapa shuru”.

The twenty-five-year-old Babri Masjid case lives on today as a series of multiple cases related to the demolition, the perpetrators, etc., that keep coming, whose hearings keep getting deferred by both parties involved. The latest deferment, due to a lack of documents, pushes the case to 2018 and Kapil Sibal, representing the Sunni Waqf Board, is hoping to get it deferred past the 2019 elections for political reasons. The case may or may not make constitutional history with the idea of the 42nd amendment to the Indian constitution coming into question, but the man who will go down in history either way is, LK Advani, the infamous star of the show.

The story of LK Advani, once the evil “lomdi”, now actually cuts a fairly tragicomic figure; one who somehow has gone from raising crowds and communal tension while riding an audacious air-conditioned van dressed up as chariot through India, to someone pushed so far to the sidelines that he’s been made a spectator to his own life.

Before Babri, let’s not forget that the BJP was a non-entity, getting as few as two seats in the Lok Sabha elections in 1984. Advani then scaled up the Ram Janmbhoomi movement in attempts to consolidate the Hindu vote for the BJP. In the following elections, the party won 86 seats, and Advani doubled down on the successful sentiment with the Rath Yatra, peaking as a political figure in 1992. BJP formed the government in ’96 and in ’99, but with the more moderate Atal Bihari Vajpayee as PM, thus beginning the decline of Advani.

LK Advani was BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate in 2009 with the now much-maligned “India Shining” plank, but having lost the “Hindu messiah” tag to Modi post-Godhra, he was trounced in the election. As Swati Chaturvedi states here, Advani actually led a revolt in the BJP when Vajpayee wanted to remove Modi after Godhra. Unfortunately for him, when Modi came to power, Advani was banished to the “Margdarshak Mandal,” which is like a geriatric club for the has-beens of Hindutva.

Along with the secular fabric of India, Advani ended up eviscerating his own legacy too.

I’m not making Advani sound like a martyr, just charting the course of a fairly impressive, and incredibly significant political career, which, in an ideologically free world, would make Advani, who just turned 90, a surprisingly sympathetic figure. Think of it as a job: You keep working toward a goal all your life, you are the company’s greatest asset, the company blows up big, but you never get your due, and in time, even your pension is scrapped.

Advani is that almost-comical figure kept around to be paraded to the courts, embarrassed in the media, all while the lawyers and judges in the case keep screaming “Tareekh pe tareekh!” We all know how this will end: Advani, like Jayalalitha, is too politically explosive to ever be sent to jail, so will only be convicted posthumously, leading his life in purgatory.

The story of LK Advani reminds us of Icarus who flew too close to the sun, and on the 25th anniversary of the Babri demolition, it’s worth remembering that, along with the secular fabric of India, Advani ended up eviscerating his own legacy too. His chequered career has led him to the one situation a politician with any ambition never wants to be in: Irrelevance.

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